Jenny looked away. The animal clinic had been in the center of the first attack weeks earlier. Mom hadn’t come home.
Dad lolled his head back so that if he’d had his eyes open, he would have been looking straight up. Eyes closed, he said, “I had a student from Japan once. He wrote English better than he spoke it, but I never understood a single one of his papers.” He brushed his fingers against his beard. “I couldn’t grade his work. It wasn’t the language. It was his understanding of the concepts behind the words. We were from the same planet but different worlds.”
“We have to get out of here, Dad.” Jenny stood. The remains of someone’s living room were scattered about. Burnt drapes still hanging from a crooked curtain rod. Books splayed across the floor, moldering from the rains. Scorch marks flowed up a table top tilted on its side. She picked her way around the trash. The back half of the house was flat, as if an explosion had pushed it away from the partly standing front walls. Wire twisted out of the shattered woodwork. A broken porcelain base showed where the toilet had been, and on the partial wall beside it a dented medicine cabinet, its mirror a cobweb of cracks, drew Jenny over. There was nothing in it though. She sighed.
From the remnant of the porch, the city reached before her, smoke shrouded, stinking of burnt rubber and other, fouler things. A jet roared overhead, away from the city, but she couldn’t see it through the haze.
“We thought we understood them at first, Jennybird.” Dad put a hand on her head. “My job was to understand them.”
Jenny put her hand on his, their twin weight resting on her head like a heavy hat. “If we hurry, we might be able to get to the hospital before dark.”
Dad trembled; she could feel it through his hand. He said, “I should have known. In the end, it was the principle of the thing. Not everyone in the South wanted to keep their slaves, you know, in the Civil War. They just didn’t like being told that they couldn’t. Different planets, different worlds.” Jenny shook her head, nearly ready to cry. Almost everything he said he’d said before, and he jumped from topic to topic. She wanted to shake him, to shake out the old Dad. He’d tell her what to do. He’d hold her and keep her safe.
Dad opened the photo album. “Do you remember this one? I’ve always liked this one.”
He pointed to the same photograph of her on the pier.
“Come on, Dad.” She led him onto long, dry grass, past a swing set with bent bars and a swing dangling from a single chain. The fence at the back of the yard had been knocked over. A cedar plank groaned when she stepped on it.
Robbie paused at a dog house partly hidden under some tree branches. He poked his nose in, tail waving madly, then trotted beside Jenny, head high, sniffing everything.
It took an hour to go ten blocks. At each street, Jenny checked for the enemy’s patrol cars… vessels… she wondered what to call a vehicle with legs. They moved into a neighborhood where houses were standing, although most windows were gone and there was no evidence of life. Maybe people are in some of them, she thought. They haven’t been caught, but they’re afraid to be out. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a civilian car driving. Two days ago the streets were filled with military trucks and humvees, frantic with movement, but they’d left before the bombardment.
Then she heard the angry beating of an alien’s plane in the distance. They ducked behind a barrier of dried shrubbery. Behind them a half empty pool, its surface black with floating ash, reflected nothing. The throbbing of movable wings filled the air.
“Ornithopter,” Dad said. “I bought one for you, Jenny, at Christmas. It didn’t fly well.” He coughed, covering his mouth with a fist. “What made us build aircraft with fixed wings? How strange we must look to them, ignoring our models in nature.”
The enemy’s plane dipped from the clouds a block away, its shiny cockpit turned partly away from them. Jenny thought about dragonflies, although it wasn’t really dragonfly-shaped. The body was as wide as it was long, except for a tail section connected to the ship with a long, slender tube that was almost invisible at this distance. Its short, blurred wings held it at a hover for a few seconds. Then it darted left, dropped out of sight, the rhythmic, vibrating pulse all around them. Jenny felt it in her chest, like music with a heavy bass turned too loud.
“Do you think it’s trying to find us, Dad?” Jenny tugged on his arm. He didn’t look at her. With his free hand he pulled a leaf from the bush, crackling it between his fingers.
“They knew English and Chinese. We were so surprised. First contact. But they couldn’t make an ‘S’ sound.”
The plane rose suddenly, straight up, vanished into the low haze, until its thrumming voice was lost. Jenny pulled Dad forward. When he stood, he grimaced and leaned his head against his shoulder.
“It was pretty funny when they said ‘Sister Sally.’ Do you know ‘Sister Sally?’”
She wished he would quit talking. It didn’t scare her as much when he was quiet.
“Zister Zally Zold Zea Zells by the Zea Zore.” Dad laughed, his voice reverberating in the silence. His cheeks were flushed and his red-rimmed eyes looked gummy.
A man wearing a brown coat, blue jeans, and bright yellow running shoes jumped over the low fence on the other side of the pool and rolled against the wood, trying to look small.
Robbie barked.
The man looked up. Jenny couldn’t tell how old he was; his face was so dirty, but when he spoke, she decided he was a teenager. “Christ! Get down. They’re all over the place,” he hissed.
Jenny listened carefully. Their vehicles made distinctive sounds. She’d never seen one that didn’t. Now that the ornithopter had gone, there was no noise in the neighborhood.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
He got up and brushed his pant legs, but she didn’t think they looked any cleaner.
“Do you have an aspirin, mister? My dad has a fever.”
The man shook his head as he slid along the house’s wall until he reached the corner, then glanced around it. “They’re going to get me. There’s no place to hide. I saw them herding people toward the stadium this morning. Thousands of people in the streets. None of them saying a word, but I could hear their feet shuffling. What do you think they do to them in the stadium? I don’t buy that ‘reorientation’ garbage.”
Dad kicked some gravel into the pool and watched the ripples. For a second, Jenny believed he might fall in, but he didn’t make a move. He stared instead.
“I really need to get him to the hospital, the one at the university. Do you know how much farther we have to go?”
The man’s attention snapped skyward for a moment, as if he expected something to swoop out of the smoke. “Yeah, sure. I was a student. You’re only about a mile away.”
Jenny sighed in relief.
He continued, “But I don’t know if any of the doctors are still there.”
Robbie joined Dad at the pool’s edge. The man flinched. “You have a dog! I haven’t seen a dog in weeks.”
“That’s Robbie. Are you sure you don’t have aspirin?”
Dad sat on the edge. His feet dangled a few inches above the black water.
“No, none. Can I pet him?”
Jenny nodded.